As Molly narrates and is narrated in the final episode of Ulysses, ‘Penelope’, a barely punctuated meandering in eight sentences and forty-odd pages, we can read in her narrative an intertextual relationship between her role and a Barthesian understanding of textuality and reading. Loose with syntax, grammar and (if only seemingly) logic, the episode presents itself as simultaneously a prose falling apart and a prose of astonishing density. Molly provides some of the most self-referential lines of the novel – ‘I dont like books with a Molly in them’, ‘O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh’, and ‘they all write about some woman in their poetry’ – and this, along with her misreading of ‘metempsychosis’, gives Molly a metatextual position in the novel: as one who responds to texts (18.657–8, 18.1128–9, 18.1333–4, 4.339). The evocation of the Homeric Penelope, implicit in the character of Molly throughout Ulysses, becomes explicit in the final tangled episode – and the correspondence between Molly and Penelope's nighttime roles is particularly clear. Having promised her suitors to choose one to marry once she has woven a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes, she weaves by day and unravels by night to buy herself much-needed time. While Penelope's deception can be read in terms of female writing (along with the weaving of other mythical mortals such as Arachne and Philomela), we can also view her activity as an intertextual link between Molly Bloom (née, nicely, Tweedy) and the reader of Ulysses. Understanding ‘text’ as a metaphor for a ‘network’, as ‘etymologically […] a tissue, a woven fabric’, lends a satisfying significance to the presence of Penelope (‘Text’, 159). The roots of ‘text’ are emphasised by Roland Barthes in ‘From Work to Text’, in which he argues that the nature of text ‘asks of the reader a practical collaboration’ (‘Text’, 163). This develops, as I have discussed before, ‘The Death of the Author’: ‘everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, “run” (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level’ (‘Author’, 147). As readers of Ulysses we are given licence to unravel and weave the text anew, forming and undoing our readings.